Letters For the Underemployed

Saturday, 22 October 2016

This is the opening sentence which is supposed to hook you and make you read on. It should be click-baity or something. Maybe have 'you won't believe what happens next' as the title.

So I'm going to throw a number at you and you won't believe what happens next.

730,000.

That's how many times my articles on the Internet have been viewed.

At least. Don't know how many were robots or people but even if it was 50-50, that is a pretty impressive number.

My books/short stories have been downloaded by 600 plus people via smashwords or kindle for their ereaders or cell phones. Technology. However, I have to clear a couple thousand ebooks or old-fashioned paper books on Amazon before I'd see a royalty check but I'm not in it for the money, although that would be nice.

After this blog post is published, one of you lucky bastards will be my 40,000th reader to this blog alone.

Sunday, 18 September 2016

- I found this in the draft folder of an old email account. Its a mass email I sent out to all my old contacts/friends at the time bFB (before Facebook). Some of you who read this may still remember it because I do some name-dropping in it when I was a DGC locations assistant. I find reading it sort of funny if you are into that sort of thing. And this was apparently before it was okay to only have 1 space after a period as I'm double-spacing every sentence. Thanks, public education.

Friday, 2 September 2016

It took nearly 45 years to truly dedicate myself heart and soul to someone, someone I've known for only 8 years but hasn't aged a day in her spirit. Someone who has shown me that I am more than what I believed, someone who has chosen to believe in me and our future together. It's been a hard yet fun road to this point with her and near every day I should remind myself this is real.

We have our fights but they don't change how we feel about each other. One bad sentence in a story won't change the ending. Jaime chose me to start a family, I chose her to raise one with me. As I watch my beautiful daughter and my two sons, all with such large personalities I am forever grateful I have her to share these memories with me.

Sure, we made some mistakes in the planning, nothing was as simple as we hoped but yet it nothing mattered to us. No ice for the beer? My bad, but no longer my problem. It's starting to rain? No problem. You can't find our kids? Not our problem. We didn't write out our thank you list? Oops, our bad. We meant no offense if we forgot anyone. No coffee for the morning after? Shit - we'll run down to the store to grab some 7 AM Sunday morning.

Personally, I felt I wrote a killer speech, thanking a lot of individuals for helping me make it to this day. I am sort of glad I didn't have it - I doubt I could have gotten past the first two people before my voice would break up and everyone would be staring at me as I'm losing my shit, crying like a baby. Someone once said it is only okay for a man to cry if he lost the big game or if his dog dies. I think publicly thanking his friends should be up there too. But I did get to thank a lot of people individually. Some left before I got to them and that sucked. Some I didn't get to thank until the next morning. But I was able to thank them for not only being part of our day, but also being part of my life. For so many to come so far and I only a spent a few quality minutes with them, it made me realize again why I have always considered them my closest friends, even if I hadn't seen them for years.

So life will move on. It is hard to believe it has nearly been a week already but things are just starting to get back to normal. Everyone has left, we've gone back to school shopping and barring a few wedding decorations needing a home, it is almost as if last week was a dream.

A crazy, beautiful dream. Thank you for being a part of it. Thank you to Jaime Royston, love of my life, even if it took a few years.

Saturday, 30 July 2016

For the interested, and on some days readers are more interested in my blog than others - this is an ongoing article on how I write a blog. This is after I have an idea but before I hit 'publish' on the sidebar. Writing is an interesting craft. I can't think of any other form where you spend hours/weeks/years building something (your story) then when you are done you think 'Fuck, this is awesome' and rush out to try to convince everyone to read it immediately. Then when you look at it six months later you wonder what the hell you were thinking. It's crap. You spelled something wrong, your main character would never walk with a limp or wear a Metallica T-shirt.So that's why I draft. Then I wait. Then I go through it again. Other artists probably just start over. I've never heard of a painting reclaimed by an artist because it was missing a tree or something, or a music album recalled because one song really sucked and the songwriter wanted to change a word or verse.I am probably oversimplifying. I don't know other artists or writers methods. I just know what I feel I am supposed to do. So here is the first draft of my idea for an article that looks at the Biggest Player in Hollywood (Steven Spielberg) and his fight to be recognized as a 'serious' auteur by the Motion Picture Academy which annually presents the Oscars with much pomp and publicity.